A guy walks into a bar car and...From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you...

An alarming exposé of the new challenges to literary freedom in the age of social media—when anyone with an identity and an internet connection can be a censor.In That Book Is Dangerous!, Adam Szetela investigates how well-intentioned and often...

A collection of essays, articles, and reviews, written for "Vogue," "Atlantic Monthly," "The New York Times," and other publications, reflects the author's full range of interests and concerns

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The inspiration for the major motion picture Rebel in the RyeOne of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, the author of the classic Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for...

If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected...

My ignorance was on my side. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write.This collection of Jamaica Kincaid’s nonfiction writing, including early...

Named a Recommended Read by The New YorkerA book of mischief and improvisation that answers fundamentalism with rage, music, and delight in this earth.A book of mischief and improvisation, The Salt of the Universe answers fundamentalism of all kinds with...

“As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”At an ominous moment in American history, Bishop Mariann Edgar...

Literature Among Discourses was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions...

The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco–Spanish...

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin’s most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar...

From the James Beard Award-nominated author of Tacky, a boldly funny, warts-and-all tour of the bad habits that make Rax King who she is"Most writers are boring people. King, though, seems different: Bettie Page meets Carrie Bradshaw."—Washington...

A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets—with urgent lessons for todayA scrap of Coleridge’s handwriting. The sugar that...

A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth centuryMany today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek...

“Take Faust, what is it? A ‘tragedy’, as its author states? A great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about Moby-Dick? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a ‘singular medley,’ as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ...

The inimitable Nancy Mitford’s account of Voltaire’s fifteen-year relationship with the Marquise du Châtelet—the renowned mathematician who introduced Isaac Newton’s revolutionary new physics to France—is a spirited romp in the company of two...